The Linux Ship of Theseus

Crossposted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27387345

1. pick any distro and install it.
2. Then, without installing another distro over the top of it, slowly convert it into another distro by replacing package managers, installed packages, and configurations.

• System must be usable and fully native to the new distro (all old packages replaced with new ones).
• No flatpaks, avoid snaps where physically possible, native packages only.

Difficulties:

• Easy: pick two similar distros, such as Ubuntu and Debian or Manjaro and Arch and go from the base to the derivative.
• Medium: Same as easy but go from the derivative to the base.
• Hard: Pick two disparate distros like Debian and Artix and go from one to the other.
• Nightmare: Make a self-compiled distro your target.

Clarifications

• chroot, dd, debootstrap, and partition editors that allow you to install the new system in an empty container or blanket-overwrite the old system go against the spirit of this challenge.
• These are very useful and valid tools under a normal context and I strongly recommend learning them.
• You can use them if you prefer, but The ship of Theseus was replaced one board at a time. We are trying to avoid dropping a new ship in the harbor and tugging the old one out.
• It may however be a good idea to use them to test out the target system in a safe environment as you perform the migration back in the real root, so you have a reference to go by.

 1. [✓] net.minetest.Minetest.Locale                    stable                i             flathub              5.8 kB / 1.6 MB   **
 2. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default             24.08                 i             flathub            156.2 MB / 156.6 MB
 3. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default             24.08extra            i             flathub             25.2 MB / 156.6 MB *
 4. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform.Locale                 24.08                 i             flathub             18.6 kB / 380.3 MB **

Look at the asterisks. It downloads far less than what it says, yet it still completes and runs fine. How‽

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26434564

Lots of feedback to respond to in regards to self-hosting, a good amount sent by Lemmy users and fediverse types. Hope you all enjoy!

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For the old farts (like me) out there.

Instructions on how to compile, screenshot, etc are all inside in the code provided @ op.

It's too bad Marcan42 deleted his Mastodon page, I wish it was at least left as read-only. It had lots of insightful hardware and software posts. I'm really feeling a void for that content and would love to read similar posts from devs. Posts that are not too long, like ones on Mastodon or Bluesky, rather than long articles (which there are an abundance of).

I've been suggested to use a tiling window manager like Sway since it allows for controlling windows with hotkeys, but I'm having trouble getting started. I installed it in Fedora and tried logging back in with SwayFX (since it has features like blurring) but after I'm just shown a wallpaper with a top bar, the top left shows a 1 and the top right shows the time. I don't know what to do there. I tried looking up guides but didn't find anything, can you link me some if you know of any?

TLDR: I want to be able to set specific window sizes and positions of the current window with hotkeys, as well as focus on specific apps with hotkeys, but I'm overwhelmed.

I've been trying to switch to Asahi Linux Fedora, and trying Gnome as my desktop environment since it can be customized with CSS, and with Wayland. I tried looking up how to change window layouts with hotkeys and it's confusing on what solution(s) I would end up wanting to use. Would I want to use a window manager?

Ultimate I want an alternative to Rectangle Pro app on Mac, which let's you set many hotketys for changing the current window's size & position: like use up the left or right halves or thirds of the screen, or corners and taking up a quarter of the screen. You can also make custom window layouts and bind those to keys.

I didn't find many results while looking up how to focus on specifc apps with hotkeys. For instance, I'd want to press CTRL Shift Z to switch specifically to Zen Browser or open it if it isn't opened, and CTRL Shift O to open or switch to Obsidian. I looked this up and didn't find options other than wmctrl or wlrctl. I tried the later: wlrctl window focus firefox, but got the error Foreign Toplevel Management interface not found!. on macOS there are many apps for this like BetterTouchTool & Hammerspoon.

What makes Linux appealing to me is the extent of customizability, but I didn't find many answers when looking up with desktop environment is them most customizable. Some say KDE is most customizable than say, Gnome, but doesn't Gnome support CSS customization while KDE doesn't?

Hector Martin (Marcan42) was the lead developer of Asahi Linux, until he recently resigned. He had a Mastodon page where he would talk about AL development and hardware stuff, as well as frustrations dealing with kernel maintainers to upstream things like Rust stuff (long before the beef that went down this month).

Marcan has made it clear he needs a break, but I really wish he at least kept his Mastodon page up, perhaps in read-only. I'll admit, I liked his posts so much I looked at it daily. I had a bookmark keyword in Firefox: I'd type tr in the URL bar to go to https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan.

Obviously we all want to avoid enshittified (aggressively monetized) software or at least get our money's worth. I'm looking at self-hosting software right now and one I'm looking has a pricing page but only for cloud (no other paywalled features) and is open source. I tried looking up future plans and didn't find much, so it doesn't seem like it will enshittify. (not related) I had thought about switching to Omnivore for a long time but then they merged with ElevenLabs and the rest is history.

So I have been kind of bummed about the lack of a screensaver option for wayland and pining for the old days, of a land that came before. I completely understand the wayland devs perspective on this. But I'm old and nostalgic so I set out to try to find a workaround.

env -u WAYLAND_DISPLAY xscreensaver --no-splash

So xscreensaver's settings won't work which makes it hard to configure. The only solution I have is to configure it in an X session and switch back to wayland. It doesn't really have a screen lock function and really I don't need/want it to. I just wanted to have some bouncing cows on my screen while I'm listening to music doing the dishes!

Thought I'd ask if anyone knows any hacks to get xscreensavers settings working under wayland so I don't have to switch sessions? Also maybe a hack to get one of the awesome xscreensavers working as a desktop background in KDE?

A side note, a lot of work went into these screensavers and I don't think they should be lost to time or relegated to the annals of history because it's lock screen functionality is kind of obsolete. I say we deserve bouncing cows!

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/32235573

I just installed a Debian 13 Trixie system on my laptop. I have 5 GPT partitions on 1 terabyte SSD and NO LVM!

partition layout

sda1 vfat 256M   EFI system partition
sda2 ext4 512M   boot partition
sda3 LUKS 460G   encrypted root
--   sda3_crypt  root partition, unlocks with passphrase
sda4 LUKS 465G   encrypted home
--   sda4_crypt  home partition, unlocks with passphrase
sda5 LUKS 4G     encrypted swap
--   sda5_crypt  swap partition, unlocks with keyfile

GRUB works fine, it loads the kernel, then I enter the password to decrypt my root partition. It decrypts correctly, then hangs for 1 minute 30 seconds.

After that, I get this error:

[ TIME ] Timed out waiting for device dev-mapper-sda4_crypt.device - /dev/mapper/sda4_crypt.
[DEPEND] Dependency failed for home.mount - /home/
[DEPEND] Dependency failed for local-fs.target - Local File Systems.
[DEPEND] Dependency failed for systemd-fsck@dev-mapper-sda4_crypt.service - File System Check on /dev/mapper/sda4_crypt.
[ TIME ] Timed out waiting for device dev-mapper-sda5_crypt.device - /dev/mapper/sda5_crypt.
[DEPEND] Dependency failed for dev-mapper-sda5_crypt.swap - /dev/mapper/sda5_crypt.
[DEPEND] Dependency failed for swap.target - Swaps

Not once does it ask me for the password to decrypt my home partition, it just waits until it fails.

Behold, a Linux maintainer openly admitting to attempting to sabotage the entire Rust for Linux project:

https://lwn.net/ml/all/[email protected]/

The good news is this doesn't affect drm/asahi, our GPU driver. The bad news is it does affect all the other drivers we're (re)writing in Rust, two so far with a third one coming.

Another choice quote, calling R4L "cancer": https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/

Personally, I would consider this grounds for removal of Christoph from the Linux project on Code of Conduct violation grounds, but sadly I doubt much will happen other than draining a lot of people's energy and will to continue the project until Linus says "fuck you" or something.

As for how to move forward, if I were one of the Rust maintainers, I would just merge the patch (which does not touch code formally maintained by the dissenter). Either Linus takes the pull, and whatever Christoph says is irrelevant, or he doesn't, and R4L dies. Everything else is a waste of everyone's time and energy.

Edit: Sent in my 2 cents: https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/[email protected]/T/#m1944b6d485070970e359bbc7baa71b04c86a30af

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/31907670

When I use the Timeshift GUI to create a snapshot, it takes a very long time to complete. If I click Cancel, my desktop environment crashes and I get kicked to a black screen or a login prompt.

When I use Timeshift CLI, it creates the snapshot in less than a second, but the command waits for a long time afterward. However, it can be safely interrupted with control-C.

Timeshift is in BTRFS mode.

Output of Timeshift command, interrupted

Using system disk as snapshot device for creating snapshots in BTRFS mode
Mounted '/dev/dm-0 (sda3)' at '/run/timeshift/33685/backup'
btrfs: Quotas are not enabled
Creating new backup...(BTRFS)
Saving to device: /dev/dm-0, mounted at path: /run/timeshift/33685/backup
Created directory: /run/timeshift/33685/backup/timeshift-btrfs/snapshots/2025-01-29_15-21-49
Created subvolume snapshot: /run/timeshift/33685/backup/timeshift-btrfs/snapshots/2025-01-29_15-21-49/@
Created control file: /run/timeshift/33685/backup/timeshift-btrfs/snapshots/2025-01-29_15-21-49/info.json
BTRFS Snapshot saved successfully (0s)
^C

#output of time command
real    0m1.165s
user    0m0.004s
sys     0m0.009s

Output of Timeshift command, run to completion

[Warning] Deleted invalid lock
Using system disk as snapshot device for creating snapshots in BTRFS mode
Mounted '/dev/dm-0 (sda3)' at '/run/timeshift/32947/backup'
btrfs: Quotas are not enabled
Creating new backup...(BTRFS)
Saving to device: /dev/dm-0, mounted at path: /run/timeshift/32947/backup
Created directory: /run/timeshift/32947/backup/timeshift-btrfs/snapshots/2025-01-29_15-13-13
Created subvolume snapshot: /run/timeshift/32947/backup/timeshift-btrfs/snapshots/2025-01-29_15-13-13/@
Created control file: /run/timeshift/32947/backup/timeshift-btrfs/snapshots/2025-01-29_15-13-13/info.json
BTRFS Snapshot saved successfully (0s)
Tagged snapshot '2025-01-29_15-13-13': ondemand
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maximum backups exceeded for backup level 'weekly'

#output of time command
real    1m12.419s
user    0m0.001s
sys     0m0.009s

Possibly related to this bug?

Hey everyone, right now, I’m mostly Mac-based. I also have an older PC, a Raspberry Pi, micro PC and a mac laptop.

Now that I’m retired and have more time on my hands, I really want to dive deep into Linux and break away from the monopoly.

I’ll definitely do my own research, but there’s so much information out there—it feels like drinking from a firehose. It’s overwhelming!

Do you have any tips or websites to help me get started, step by step? I know I’ll make plenty of mistakes along the way (that’s how ya learn), but I’d appreciate any advice you can share. Thanks!

I'm wondering if that's possible with any desktop environment. Basically I want windows with translucent backgrounds with blurring like shown in this post; except that it always shows the wallpaper right behind the window, even if there are windows between it and the desktop. Normally with blurred background setups like that one, a window will blur the content of whatever windows are behind / beneath it.

Ok so I am currently running Kubuntu 20.04 but I'm being hounded to upgrade and I guess I'll do it on the 1st. But I've been hearing that there are some issues with upgrading and keeping your home partition encrypted and separate. What I want is to have my root and boot partitions on one ssd and my home on another with everything encrypted using LUKS ( I don't think I should encrypt the /boot). Has anyone done this with this version of Kubuntu? I think they changed the installer making this more difficult.

Thanks

This is an opinion. Not even a shower thought, but something that I just realized I could express succinctly.

I'm a TUI/CLI person. I look first for CLI programs, and only if I don't find a way to do it in a shell do I look at GUI alternatives.

I'm also a tiling WM person. I used i3 for several years, and then bspwm for a hot minute, and for nearly a year now have been in herbstluftwm. I'm at a point where hlwm not running on Wayland is the main reason I'm not on Wayland.

But at one point, before discovering the joys of tiling, I was a big KDE fan. So it's been interesting to find myself skipping Qt apps in favor of GTK apps when I have to use GUI apps; and just now I realized why:

When you pull a GTK app, only rarely does it link in a bunch of Gnome dependencies; when it does, it's usually pretty obvious in the name or description... "X for Gnome" or some such. But Qt apps are really bad about hooking in and pulling a bunch of KDE dependencies, launching KDE services, and generally trying to turn your WM into KDE, that I've learned to just avoid them. There's no reason for them to, unless it's because the KDE libraries provide so much functionality that isn't in the core Qt libraries.

Anyway, it just occurred to me why I have such a negative knee-jerk reaction to apps with Qt dependencies; I literally just filter them out as I'm scanning package lists.

I like Qt; I don't like that most Qt apps also depend on KDE libraries.

Personally I don't watch videos on software (except for skimming tutorials) since I prefer to learn about topics with written tutorials or Reddit. Software influencers have been on the rise for the past several years, everything from grifters claiming they can help you start an SWE career, to ones that make tutorials and showcases on software.

I'm more interested in hearing about the later. I came across found this discussion: What can we learn from Neovim’s rise in popularity? : emacs, with comments claiming that Youtubers like ThePrimeagen have helped a lot with making Neovim popular. I crossposted it to r/neovim and many so far many users there said that they found Neovim through ThePrimeagen's videos.

Howdy,

Debian is complaining that /boot is full and no wonder, it's only 488 MiB. I see some stuff I can remove, but I also want to resize the partition. other than a tiny /boot the rest is taken up by an LVM volume for my /home. I figured I'd split it up someday and LVM looked interesting.

Gparted let me shrink the LVM volume a bit to make a 1.5Gib space, but I can't seem to increase the /boot EXT2 partition with that free space.

KDE partition manager lets me resize the LVM partition but I also can't increase the size of /boot.

I'm thinking it's something about the LVM logical vs physical volumes.

What am I missing? I did all of this from live USBs of Fedora and Kubuntu and Pop! to see if it made a difference. There don't seem to be many GUI LVM tools but I worry I'm making some fundamental mistake because I've resized partitions for years without issue. Any help would be appreciated.

As a side note, why does KDE ppartition Manager think my big LVM volume is mostly full? It isn't even close, maybe 25% used.

@linux Left/Right channel balance in pipewire
How do i set a volume of just one channel in #pipewire through cli? Can i set a ratio somewhere in the config?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22801721

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/27307432

Looks like Discord finally fixed Linux screen and audio sharing with Wayland